When the refinery comes to a stop

A labyrinth of end­less­ly wind­ing pipes, tall smoke­stacks and inter­twined struc­tures is what the work­ers in blue hel­mets and blue pro­tec­tive uni­forms con­fi­dent­ly wind their way through. They busy them­selves with turn­ing valves, weld­ing pipes and putting up the scaf­fold­ing. They get on their bicy­cles to reach their work loca­tions more quick­ly – the 320 hectares of the Total refin­ery Mit­teldeutsch­land are equal to 500 soc­cer fields put togeth­er. A 140-meter-high flare stack, its flame burn­ing night and day, tow­ers over the plant and is vis­i­ble from afar. The refin­ery could apt­ly be described as a self-con­tained world of its own.

Total’s refin­ery Mit­teldeutsch­land in Leu­na is one of the most mod­ern indus­tri­al plants in Europe. Its out­put prod­ucts include gaso­line, heat­ing oil, liq­ue­fied gas, diesel and methanol – indis­pens­able raw mate­ri­als for any econ­o­my. It is easy to see that oper­at­ing and main­tain­ing such a huge facil­i­ty is no sim­ple task.

The tech­ni­cians deployed here by the Mannheim-based indus­tri­al ser­vices provider Bil­fin­ger are no strangers to the chal­lenges that the plant and its oper­a­tion present in prac­tice. For 24 years now, the com­pa­ny has been work­ing with the refin­ery in Leu­na, assist­ing with var­i­ous mod­ern­iza­tion and expan­sion mea­sures, for exam­ple. Only recent­ly, the Total refin­ery award­ed Bil­fin­ger two fur­ther major con­tracts worth rough­ly EUR 30 mil­lion: The first involves exchang­ing the reac­tor sys­tems; the sec­ond, per­form­ing the turn­around for the plant’s POX methanol facil­i­ty. More than 800 Bil­fin­ger spe­cial­ists will be involved in these two projects.

The first of them – replac­ing the six reac­tor sys­tems – will have to be car­ried out in the midst of ongo­ing pro­duc­tion oper­a­tions and, if at all pos­si­ble, with­out any down­times. This is because the reac­tor sys­tems, along with the down­stream plant com­po­nents, con­vert heavy petro­le­um residues from the refin­ery into methanol, a key indus­tri­al input chem­i­cal, by means of par­tial oxi­da­tion (POX). This will be the most exten­sive refur­bish­ment work ever done on the Leu­na plant, which is one of the last indus­tri­al holdovers from the Com­mu­nist peri­od in East­ern Ger­many. The project is expect­ed to result in a 20% increase in the vol­ume of methanol produced.

A project of this mag­ni­tude requires care­ful advance prepa­ra­tion; accord­ing­ly, plan­ning was begun as ear­ly as at the start of 2019. Ger­ald Weber has been look­ing after the plant’s main­te­nance for a long time. The twen­ty-year vet­er­an of Bilfinger’s Engi­neer­ing & Main­te­nance ser­vice line explains how he and his team will bring the plant up to the lat­est tech­ni­cal stan­dard: “We will be remov­ing and mod­ern­iz­ing each of the reac­tors indi­vid­u­al­ly, which weigh between 60 and 70 tons – a process that will take 85 days each. Our tasks will also include build­ing a new burn­er-cool­ing system.”

The project’s logis­tics present a par­tic­u­lar chal­lenge: The plant com­po­nents to be installed are big and heavy. Thus, a spe­cial crawler crane with a capac­i­ty of 600 tons will be used to fit the reac­tors into place. Sev­er­al days will be need­ed just to set up and remove the crane and to pre­pare its oper­at­ing lane – a process that will have to be repeat­ed for each of the six reac­tors. Trans­port­ing the crane and its appur­tenant equip­ment will require some 50 trucks. Weber pro­vides the details: “So you see that our ser­vices con­sist of more than the pre-assem­bly work and the con­ver­sion as such. Just as impor­tant is our prepara­to­ry plan­ning and our coor­di­na­tion of the var­i­ous trades on the con­struc­tion site. In the end, every­thing has to run like clock­work. It’s high-pre­ci­sion work. Of course, safe­ty always comes first.” The reac­tors are sched­uled to be replaced by the end of 2021, there­by com­plet­ing the project.

By this time, the sec­ond con­tract award­ed to Bil­fin­ger – the refinery’s turn­around in the fall of 2020 – will also have been com­plet­ed. Gerd Braune, the engi­neer at the Bil­fin­ger Engi­neer­ing & Main­te­nance ser­vice line who is super­vis­ing the turn­around, explains: “Oper­a­tors are oblig­at­ed to shut down their plants in this way at reg­u­lar inter­vals. This sort of gen­er­al inspec­tion is intend­ed to ensure that the plant remains tech­ni­cal­ly reli­able, legal­ly com­pli­ant and envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly. We will be mak­ing the plant fit for the next six years while pro­vid­ing top-to-bot­tom main­te­nance.” The plant has to be kept idle while all this is going on, Braune points out, there­by caus­ing sub­stan­tial turnover loss­es for the oper­a­tor: “Our job is to keep these loss­es as small as pos­si­ble. Every addi­tion­al day of down­time for the plant increas­es the eco­nom­ic dam­age our cus­tomers stand to suffer.”

In order to keep such down­times as short as pos­si­ble, Bil­fin­ger has devel­oped its own in-house con­cept for exe­cut­ing turn­arounds. “How we go about it exact­ly is a trade secret,” says Braune and laughs: “But I can say this much: Effi­cient sched­ul­ing and work plan­ning are essen­tial. Anoth­er fac­tor is that our work­force is high­ly qual­i­fied and very famil­iar with the rou­tines involved in such inter­ven­tions. What’s more, we’re using dig­i­tal solu­tions to an increas­ing degree.” The results speak for them­selves: Every year, Bil­fin­ger per­forms around 30 com­pre­hen­sive turn­arounds of indus­tri­al plants across Europe. The ser­vice field respon­si­ble for turn­arounds has expend­ed 4.5 mil­lion man-hours of work in recent years – and this with­out a
sin­gle acci­dent entail­ing lost work­ing days. This hope­ful­ly will hold true also for the turn­around of the TOTAL refin­ery Mitteldeutschland.

Bil­fin­ger acts as gen­er­al con­trac­tor for a num­ber of the plant’s sys­tems, includ­ing the POX methanol facil­i­ty. The main­te­nance ser­vices, which have been planned far in advance, must be com­plet­ed with­in four to six weeks. This will involve open­ing, inspect­ing and clean­ing innu­mer­able con­tain­ers and pipes – and of course also repair­ing them if need­ed. Sub­se­quent­ly, the indi­vid­ual com­po­nents will be inspect­ed and cer­ti­fied by the Ger­man Tech­ni­cal Super­vi­sion Asso­ci­a­tion (TÜV). Braune sums up: “What counts here is expe­ri­ence, famil­iar­i­ty with the rou­tines, and keep­ing a cool head: Every move has to be exe­cut­ed per­fect­ly and the rel­e­vant work steps have to be clear to all involved.”

To ensure that this is the case, giant work­flow dia­grams wall­pa­per have been hung up where every­one can see them. These depict the indi­vid­ual work steps and work pack­ages, which can then be checked off as they are com­plet­ed. Thus, every­one will be able to keep an eye on the big pic­ture. As Braune puts it, “A turn­around is a like a vast mosa­ic com­posed of many small tiles rep­re­sent­ing work pack­ages, one that has been painstak­ing­ly planned two years in advance.” In fact, a plan­ning peri­od this long is indis­pens­able: Cer­tain por­tions of the plant will be turned into huge con­struc­tion sites for short peri­ods of time, where many peo­ple will be expect­ed to work in coor­di­na­tion at very close quar­ters. It goes with­out say­ing that, despite the intense time pres­sure involved, occu­pa­tion­al safe­ty and dili­gence will always have top priority.

With these two projects, Bil­fin­ger will sup­port the Total refin­ery in fur­ther boost­ing its com­pet­i­tive­ness. The com­plete replace­ment of the reac­tors will form part of the “Leu­na 2020+” cat­a­logue of mea­sures intend­ed to make the refin­ery viable for the future. By ramp­ing up its pro­duc­tion of methanol, the refin­ery is react­ing to declin­ing demand for heavy fuel prod­ucts. The Total refin­ery com­pound in Leu­na is set to see a lot of activ­i­ty in the near future!